My blog entry on Volta, GWT and leaky abstractions has been reproduced in the .NET Developers’ Journal.
This was a particularly interesting post because a lot of people are pretty impressed with Volta, and on the face of it, I was pointing out what I saw as its potential shortcomings. It has also attracted some comments from fairly accomplished developers — Bruce Johnson of Google’s GWT team, and Mats Helander, who wrote one of the first O/R mappers for the .net framework. However, while I may have come across a bit negatively, my opinion is not actually so much an anti-Volta/GWT/RJS one as a pro-JavaScript one. Since I started taking JavaScript seriously a year or so ago, I’ve really started to appreciate it, and to be honest, I think that developers who hide from it altogether behind abstraction layers of whatever nature are really losing out.
I’ve also had an e-mail from a journalist asking me for my opinion on MySpace for an article that she’s writing. I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask on that one to be honest: my experience of MySpace is pretty much limited to opening an account, discovering it doesn’t work with Windows Live Writer, closing it again, getting spammed, and experiencing all the yuk-that-is-gross reactions that any respectable, standards compliant, XHTML addicted web developer experiences on seeing your average profile page with gratuitous background images, animated GIFs, thrash metal background music, and broken rendering in Firefox.
It’s interesting where blogging can take you…
I’ve been thinking a bit more about my blog and what to do with it.
Content wise, it seems to have pretty much settled down into a topical blog, concentrating largely on software development and the surrounding culture. I sometimes wonder if it’s become a bit too impersonal lately though — perhaps some more non-work-related posts are in order.
I’d like to get a regular rhythm up and running too. Scott Hanselman wrote recently about your blog’s "heartbeat" — how often you post in particular. Mine has been somewhat variable in the past, between one and nine posts a month, though I like to try and post at least once a week if I can. This month I’ve decided to try something new, so I’ve written a bunch of posts ahead of time and set them to go live automatically every Monday and Thursday. Anything on top of that is a bonus. Perhaps I should have done that at the start of September, when first I was off on holiday in Scotland and then when we came back we had a church media fast. Some people write twenty or more blog entries a month — personally it beats me how on earth they find the time to do so, and contribute to various open source projects, and get any work done, and have any kind of a social life to speak of.
As far as technology is concerned, I’ve decided to stick with WordPress for the foreseeable future. Architecturally it may be completely wonky, and you may need to keep a constant eye out for security updates, but in terms of features it is the best blogging software available and pretty much a de facto standard, and there is little reason to switch to anything else.
Posted at 14:00 on 4 October 2007.
Tagged:
blogging
Our church is organising a communication and media master class on 19-20 October with Mal Fletcher. This is highly recommended for anyone who is interested in using media in a Christian context. Mal Fletcher is one of those guys who is pretty hip with using modern technology and Web 2.0 and so on to communicate. I gather that the last time he was here, he was getting everyone excited about blogging, podcasting and the like. Unfortunately I missed that particular meeting so I don’t know exactly what he said, but the feedback sounded pretty good. His websites, nextwaveonline.com and edges.tv, have a lot of interesting and effective articles, videos and documentaries on various social issues that affect us all these days.
I often think it would be particularly good to see churches making much more effective use of blogging in particular to communicate their message. Blogging has a much more personal, authentic feel to it than traditional websites, especially if comments are enabled so that visitors can feel part of the discussion. For some reason, blogs don’t seem to have a particularly high profile on most major ministries’ websites though.
(For anyone wanting to get into blogging in a Christian context, The Blogging Church by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch is a must-read.)
Well just a couple of days after I reinstalled Windows on my laptop, the screen finally decided to die. This means that until I get it replaced, I’m offline in the evenings and at weekends. It’s about time I replaced my laptop anyway though. It’s now nearly four years old, and while it’s still perfectly serviceable, it’s beginning to get a bit geriatric in computer terms now. It weighs a ton and feels like having a fan heater sitting on your lap, it gets that hot.
I think this will give my wrists a bit of a well-earned rest. They’ve been getting a bit sore with my recent experiments with /(Dvor|Colem)ak/. Shai Coleman, the designer of Colemak, responded to a comment that I made on the Colemak forums saying that you do experience some discomfort initially, but it goes if you persist. However, I am still on qwerty at work and that isn’t likely to change now.
I’ll still be blogging when I get a chance, however. I’ll just be relying on pen and paper a lot more for the first draft of each entry. I think this speeds up the process somewhat though. I tend to be something of a perfectionist at times: I find it all too easy to either (a) over-research my blog posts, or (b) spend too long editing, chopping and changing them, and just having a pen and paper puts a bit of a restraining hand on me from both these tendencies, since I have to write it all offline in one pass without recourse to Wikipedia.
Kingdom Faith has a new website design, and the long awaited RSS feeds on the video blogs have finally arrived. There’s some great teaching, and you can have Google Reader or Internet Explorer 7 automatically alert you whenever there’s more for you to watch, listen to or read, without having to go back to the site every so often to check. Nice one.
Even better, I am told the video blogs will have a comment system in the near future.
That’ll be pretty exciting if they do it right. Comments are a crucial element of blogging: your readers can post their own feedback which will then appear below your article. In this way you can interact with them — they can ask you questions or initiate a discussion, and if you do it right, it gives them a feeling that they are actually interacting with real human beings rather than someone who is standing six feet above contradiction. It gives pastors a great way of interacting with, and even maybe widening, their audience beyond the four walls of the church.
There’s a new book coming out in the New Year called The Blogging Church, which looks like it could be a pretty good read. It is written by Brian Bailey, the technology director at Fellowship Church in Dallas, Texas, the fifth largest church in the USA. Bailey is also a friend of blogging guru and former Microsoftie Robert Scoble. Scoble’s book, Naked Conversations, is itself a must-read for anyone who is serious about blogging. It doesn’t blind you with science or technobabble, but focuses much more on the social and business aspects of blogging.
So pastors everywhere — you know what to do: get blogging. If you don’t know how to get started, the WordPress hosted service is as good as any.
Hehe, I’m no longer the only blogger in the family.
I set one up for Aaron a while ago too, but that doesn’t seem to have come to much yet.
I just noticed the other day that every single entry on the home page of my blog mentions something or other computer-related. Even the entries about Faith Camp don’t get a respite.
I know I work with the things, but I guess I’d better watch out, otherwise I’ll end up with someone laying hands on me. After all, there are certain individuals knocking around who are all too eager to subject you to deliverance ministry if they think that your interests are getting too narrowly focused.
So what do you say? Do you reckon I can manage ten consecutive blog entries without mentioning anything to do with computers at all?
A new feature of Faith Camp this year is a daily video report from around the showground, which is shown on the screens at some point in the main meeting every evening. Pastor Colin introduced them last night, saying “Apparently, the in word is ‘blog’. So here is our first video blog.”
It’s a great idea, though perhaps a slight misunderstanding of the word “blog” — which actually means an online diary that allows readers to post comments. A bit like my own website, for example. Purists such as Robert Scoble would add the requirement for RSS feeds, trackbacks and pinging blog search engines such as Technorati, though in practice, not all blogs do this. Then again, I guess we could stretch the definition a bit just for Faith Camp. There aren’t likely to be that many people going online on the East of England Showground during the week, after all.
Update: They’ve put the videos online. Lovely. I think that qualifies as a blog now.
It’s great that our church makes good use of all the technological resources at its disposal to spread the Gospel. We couldn’t make it to the service yesterday morning, so we got the live stream over the Internet. It’s wonderful that modern technology makes it possible for you to get church to come to you when you can’t get to church.
The new video blogs look set to be quite promising if they do it right. It’s just a bit of a shame that there are no RSS feeds — I’d love to plug them into my news reader. C’mon guys, once Windows Vista hits the shelves in a few months, RSS is gonna go mainstream big time.
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